Experimentation seems lost in the hobby. This is my attempt to spread some new ideas and help enable those who want to explore something new..

Friday, August 24, 2012

HSMM-MESH™ firmware ports

As announced by the QEX Magazine editor back in 2010, there are some groups of amateurs in Texas working together to implement a mesh network of HSMM nodes.

Think of this as similar to the D-Star network, but operating at a much higher data rate. The groups in Austin include ARES, Roadrunner Microwave Group, Texas Emergency Management, and Red Cross. There is also a fair amount of work being done in Dallas and Plano. Glenn Currie, KD5MFW, gave a presentation to a standing room only group at the Austin Summerfest this past Saturday, so interest is growing significantly.

The group doing the heavy lifting of developing software and hardware has been very busy over the past couple years. And there has been a large following.

There have been many requests to expand support for Ubiquiti devices and other hardware platforms. The WRT54G series isn't really in production anymore. But one can usually find them at thrift stores relatively cheap.

The Ubiquiti Bullet, Nanostation and other devices are readily available for about $75 each. Ubiquiti products use the Atheros chipset, where as Linksys WRTs, use Broadcom. Custom ham only channels and channel widths are possible with the Atheros chipset, but not currently available for Broadcom.

Fortunately Brian, KY9K of Yelm, Washington has come up with some development grade HSMM-MESH firmware that will support other devices:

HSMM-Mesh: Development Firmware with OLSRd v0.6.3Mon Jul 30All,

I've uploaded my development HSMM-Mesh firmware to my server:

This is identical to the official HSMM-Mesh v0.4.3 release with two exceptions:

Since the new version of OLSRd fixes a byte-ordering bug that affects the WRT54G/GS units, this version will not interoperate with the official HSMM-Mesh release. The changes are all hidden under the hood and don't change the user operation.

The huge upside is that this version will talk to hardware from other vendors. I've got it talking to a Ubiquiti Bullet an a pair of D-Link DIR-825s on the bench right now.

If you've got time and some curiosity to spare, give it a whirl. Works great for every test I've done, but I'd like to get some extra eyeballs on it.